The successes of WordPress, Shopify, and Magento have proven the usefulness of off-the-shelf code bases and tools--but their easy-to-use structure makes them difficult to customize for purposes they weren't built for. Custom-built code bases, on the other hand, are flexible but require professional construction. Both are viable solutions for different projects, but in an Internet future where design is king, getting 100% of your envisioned functionality is what distinguishes you in a saturated digital marketplace.

Take it from engineering firm Happy Fun Corp--they're the emergency responders who build the custom code base you should've bought in the first place.

The problem isn't that off-the-shelf doesn't work, says HFC Cofounder Ben Schippers. It's that you'll never get what you really want out of it. The off-the-shelf will get you 70% of the way toward the software, tool, or website solution you really wanted.

"At that point you've got to start assessing, 'Do I go really deep into this existing platform that I bought and hack around what I have to make it an 85% solution? Or do I scrap what I have now and built it from the ground up'--because you'll never get to 100%. You have to build something custom to get to 100%," says Schippers.

That 100% doesn't just mean functionality--Schippers is talking design. A decade ago, a website would be prized for its functionality, but it takes an attractive user interface to hook users for the bare second they spare to eye your website or app.

HFC deals with a lot of 911 emergency clients who either found their off-the-shelf codebase problematic or paid for an unsatisfactory custom codebase. A botched custom job could come from a freelancer in over their head or a foreign developer shop that's deaf to Western cultural needs. In all of these cases, HFC's client was looking to save money and ended up paying more down the line instead of contracting a good dev shop in the first place.

In the four years HFC has spent addressing clients with off-the-shelf code base emergencies, they've scrapped the off-the-shelf code base and built their clients a new one 70% of the time. HFC improves and builds out the client's existing off-the-shelf solutions for the other 30%--but reluctantly, and only because it's a money or time issue.

Off-The-Shelf? Sure, But Only As It Was Intended

Whereas HFC caters to midsize and established clients, Startup Giraffe is a four-man team that brainstorms solutions for small startups. They choose clients early in the development stage that haven't built full code bases yet--so-called "green field" projects. Most of the time, Startup Giraffe builds a young company's first custom code base instead of customizing off-the-shelf software, and the resulting custom solution ends up being much closer to the client's original vision. If any company needs to distinguish its product ASAP, it's a startup.

They'll still work with a company that's chosen to build their code base from an off-the-shelf solution. For a lot of very young companies, it's a good first step, says Startup Giraffe cofounder Amit Klein.

"For testing the market, validating your ideas, getting your first set of customers, it's very possible to use an existing [off-the-shelf] solution," says Klein. "Frameworks are really good for getting up and running really quickly. For a lot of people, it's a very good first step, using Drupal, Magento, Shopify. The problem with frameworks comes when you start making customizations and a lot of times, something that seems very straightforward can be very complex because you're doing something with the framework in a way that it doesn't want you to do it."

For long-term, Klein says, unless you're doing something very straightforward like simple e-commerce or blogging tools, it's generally better to do a custom job. The advantage of doing something custom is that you can control the experience from end to end. That comes with additional cost, but it allows you to be more nimble and to make more customizations. It's all about managing expectations.

Part Of Building Is Teaching

Often, first-time entrepreneurs have no idea why some code base-building services cost less. This is what can result in the aforementioned botched jobs, but Startup Giraffe doesn't do many 911 emergency code base rescues. The danger of using freelance work is the minefield that a code base can become when the delivered product does not match the client's expectations.

"Sometimes people come to us and say, 'Hey, we had this built in India for a few thousand bucks and it's 90% of the way there' and the answer is always no. Because it's a disaster," says Klein. "We don't like working on other people's code bases. We strongly prefer green-field projects and doing things right from day one."

It's gotten better, HFC's Schippers says. Circa 2011, half of HFC's customers would just walk up with an idea to bend WordPress or Magento to their vision. It would take at least two meetings for the client to understand the difference between what they're trying to build and what these services provide out of the box.

Building New Territory

And there are occasions where you're making something so new that, well, there IS no off-the-shelf solution. Josh Abrahmson created content portal CollegeHumor with high school friends way back in 1999--before there was really any website-building product, so they coded the site themselves. Then they coded their own e-commerce tools when they built apparel site BustedTees in 2004. That same year, Abrahmson was part of the team that brought Vimeo to life, the first video website that allowed users to upload content (YouTube wouldn't hit the Internet until 2005).

Abrahmson's teams had few, if any, options in the early years of website development. That's changed. Last year, Abrahmson's 10-person team had its hands full running BustedTees when they started spitballing a new apparel site. BustedTees is a profitable site, but it's a decade old. The future TeePublic would allow users to upload designs themselves for others to buy--a modern concept for modern consumers.

Unlike a larger company, BustedTees couldn't afford to hire on more developers to build a site for a project that might not fly. They contracted HappyFunCorp to build them a site. Once it went live, Abrahmson felt confident enough to hire on two more developers to maintain and grow TeePublic.

Where Off-The-Shelf Has Yet To Venture

While Startup Giraffe's small size keeps them agile, it also allows them to be picky with clients. More importantly, they've found a niche creating mobile code bases, a frontier with little (if any) off-the-shelf code base solutions.

Being a four-person company means Startup Giraffe has to distinguish itself from all the other dev shops--not just in choosing young clientele, but in developing its niche. After working on several iOS projects, Startup Giraffe veered away from Apple's constricting walled garden and into the undersaturated Android solutions market.

Most of Startup Giraffe's current projects are for Android, a less-crowded OS expertise niche with the added bonus of being the OS of choice for an ever-increasing range of devices from tablets to Arduinos. It's also has a great third-party ecosystem of tools and an open developer community that's always building more.

There are off-the-shelf options for mobile, but most of them are CMSs--appmakers to make simple apps for your restaurant or store, says Klein. The trick is that only a fraction of their custom programming actually ends up in the app--by volume, most of their code base goes into the communication between app and server. Klein is genuinely intrigued by mobile projects, but in this corner of programming's Wild West, Startup Giraffe has carved expertise in a field where off-the-shelf is lagging far behind.

The Shrinking Chance of In-House Development

The third option--building your code base in-house--is much harder these days thanks to the glut of startups sucking up all the good programming talent. Logically, this drives business into HFC's and Startup Giraffe's hands, but even they see the rising scarcity of skilled programmers in the developer landscape.

"It's always difficult to recruit top talent, and that's especially true these days. It's true for technologists and especially true for great mobile technologists. It's much easier to find a great WordPress developer than a great Android developer," says Klein.

The harder it is to find top talent--really, the more expensive it is to prolong timelines while you search for top talent--the more likely companies will choose to consult dev shops for solutions. This means a rising tide of professionalism, for better and for worse.

On the plus side, contracting a dev shop for a custom code base means getting a firm deadline, says BustedTees' Abrahmson. While BustedTees' in-house projects often took roughly 50% longer than expected to deploy, dev shops put their reputation on the line when contracted. Despite many off-the-shelf products promising customer support to help customize the code to your needs, it's still on your developer to build out your product--and that takes your own time.

But the saturation of tech and ascendence of good design means client expectations are higher, Klein says. It's not just MVPs that expect higher polished products and more functionality--the entire market expects it. That means it's getting more expensive to launch new products. Part of that is because dev shop clients themselves face new issues from the saturation: Customer acquisition is more expensive and people have higher expectations for the products they want to use.

Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and the rest of our social networks have trained us to respond to notifications like Pavlovian dogs. So we were surprised to hear Brian Bailey, creator of a new social network called Uncommon, isn't out to get you addicted.

"Basically [we're] rejecting a lot of the techniques that we know do work in terms of getting people to click as much as possible, read as much as possible, stay as much as possible," says Bailey. But can you actually build a network that way?

"I think all of us involved do feel like there's plenty of room for something very different in the approach of how communities are done online," says Bailey. He thinks the drug-like traits of these networks owes mostly to their mid-2000s vintage.

"There were so many different techniques at that time: how to create engagement, how to drive pageviews, how to increase clicks, how to do all these different things," he says.
"All things that are designed to get people to spend as much time as possible on the site, primarily to see as many ads as possible. "

In Bailey's view, this has resulted in an erroneous conflation between the language of social media and the language of community. Now every company worth its salt has a social media strategy, claiming a desire to foster community--when really all they want is an audience. Uncommon was built to create an online community more reflective of a real-world one, and not the kind that we've grown accustomed to through social media.

In about two weeks, Bailey hopes to open the site up to a small group of founding members who will try the site on for size and provide feedback before Uncommon opens to the public. Currently, the way it works is like this:

Like most social networks, you start with a profile. They'll be quite spare, and consist mostly of your favorite things--things you want to connect over and talk about. Anyone can click on one of their favorite things and see a list of other people who also like it--Bailey says that eventually, the Uncommon team hopes to use this as the basis to introduce people to one another.

Pretty standard so far, right? Here's where Uncommon starts to change things up. Instead of notifications, users will find Stacks waiting for them when they sign in--postcards with announcements, notable contributions from other members, discussion prompts and the like.

"The goal is to make it a refreshing stop whether you visit each day or once a month. It's also designed to be limited," says Bailey. "Though someone can certainly continue to explore the site, the suggestion will be that once you finish the stack, you're free to move on to other important things in your life. We like to say Uncommon is a trampoline, not a rabbit hole."

Want to invite friends? Great. But carpetbombing your Gmail contacts with email invites is both annoying and contrary to Uncommon's ethos. Instead, Uncommon users will send a postcard. Uncommon is a subscription service--users pay $24 for a year--but every membership comes with a free year for you to give away to a friend to join. The blank postcard comes in the mail with your welcome note--every Uncommon user gets one of those--for you to send to whomever you wish.

"It's a way to foster online community in a very unique, different way," says Bailey. "Could the online experience of this be as healthy and supportive to the people using it as possible, even if it's kind of a detriment to its broad appeal or long-term success?"

It's a tight wire act that sounds impossible, but Bailey doesn't seem to mind. Uncommon is a passion project; Bailey and his team have all been working on it in their spare time since 2012. He regularly states that Uncommon's ideal of community comes first--the design and the business end of things can be sorted out later. Because of that, the Uncommon team is asking all sorts of questions that aren't often asked in modern web development.

"One of the core things we talk about is, 'How can we design something that is wonderful whenever you visit it?" says Bailey. "No matter if you visit it once a day or once a month. How can it be a wonderful experience in both cases? And if you do visit once a month, how can we make it so you don't feel like you're behind or you missed out?"

Currently, Uncommon isn't open to the public, nor has it taken its proper shape. Right now, it's a loose collection of a small group of 100 founding members who have been writing and sharing things weekly. Or not. Bailey likens Uncommon to a front porch--come and go as you wish, have a great conversation while you're here. No one really has to do anything.

Bailey is not expecting Uncommon to be huge or experience staggering exponential growth--but he does hope that the people who join are looking for the same thing: a slower web where people are the main attraction.

"It's always going to grow best by very personal storytelling from one person to another," says Bailey. That's the sort of thing that he hopes will make Uncommon worth your while.

But don't feel pressured to stay.

Scott Keeney can't find a position to comfortably seat his 6-foot-3 frame. He gets up from a bright orange couch, dusts off a speck of lint from his immaculate white Nikes, then paces the carpeted floors of a plush 1,680-square-foot studio. Cameras follow, producers in an adjacent control room stand by, and a throng of teens waiting offstage attempt to snap photos of the man known as DJ Skee.

Here, in the downtown Los Angeles headquarters of Mark Cuban's AXS TV, Keeney holds court. But as he waits for his next guest, tiny beads of sweat roll down his chiseled jawline. The DJ, producer, and pop culture personality has spent the last decade using social media to catapult from unknown A&R intern to the host of nationally syndicated radio shows on KIIS-FM and Sirius XM's Hip Hop Nation. But in this industry, his is not a stereotypical success story.

With over half a million social media followers and a squeaky clean image in a culture known for promoting anything but family friendly behavior, he's been called the Ryan Seacrest of hip-hop. But as Skee waits for a very late big-name rapper to grace his stage, he's no longer a calm, confident 30-year-old. He's just as anxious as the youngsters who clamor excitedly when the massive cameras pan their screeching faces.

"Where's 2Chainz?" Skee mutters under his breath.

Building An Authentic Brand By Breaking With Convention

Skee is something of a paradox in the braggadocio-fueled world of hip-hop. First, he's a white guy who doesn't smoke, drink, or do drugs. And he smiles. A lot. He looks like the illusive 18-34 sweet-spot marketers salivate over: tall, fit, with piercing blue eyes and close-cropped dirty blond hair. He has that all-American boy-next-door quality. At the same time, he's produced records for hardcore artists like the rapper Game, and his brand affiliation, from Google to McDonald's to shoe companies, has won him respect in the streets and boardrooms, and the admiration of hip-hop and sneaker heads worldwide.

Unlike many DJs, who promote a hard-partying, anti-authority image, Skee seems genuinely comfortable in his own skin, not conforming to stereotype. He was recently named a champion in the UN Foundation charities Girl Up and Nothing But Nets. This month, his company SKEEMATIC launched a social good campaign with AT&T to help give fans jobs. How many mainstream DJs volunteer with the UN or provide the kids that look up to them a foot in the door?

"I could not be more excited about this opportunity," he says. "The UN Foundation does so much good for the world, it was a natural fit to take advantage of all the various platforms, connections, and outlets I have."

Those platforms, connections, and outlets include two radio shows that reach 20 million weekly listeners, and nearly half a million combined social followers, which gives Skee a direct line of communication to fans. Plus his show on AXS TV, now entering its second season, reaches another 40 million people. Both Billboard and Forbes have named him to their power-players-under-30 lists. That's why organizations like the UN, and major brands, love working with him. Because when they get Skee, they also get access to his arsenal.

"We work with over a dozen brands," says Ryan Tomlinson, Skee's business partner of seven years. What began as a ragtag management group in the mid-2000s has evolved into SKEEMATIC, one of the biggest and most polished under-the-radar media companies in L.A., if not all of entertainment. If Skee is the face of the company, Tomlinson as the president is the brains, wrangling the brands interested in working with Skee and his guests. From there, it's strategize, create, share.

"We talk about aspirational lifestyles, and Skee's the architect of that," Tomlinson explains. "Then we align the exact narrative with the brands that we go after to underwrite that content. Part of that strategy is: Where does it live, and how do we meet consumers in the places where they live and breathe? Whatever that content is, we create it all in-house. We hit the audience at all the touch points: online, radio, mobile, out-of-home distribution in screens in fast food restaurants, airport terminals, TV."

Inked deals include Google, AT&T, Boost Mobile, Mountain Dew, McDonald's, 7-Eleven; major companies who want in on Skee, and the influencers he rubs shoulders with. Through his radio and TV programs, Skee provides entertainers with a forum, and in return, Skee gets content to push online. Both parties also get exposure to brands, hungry to get a piece of the influencer pie, and access to all of their devotees. It's win-win-win.

That's why Mark Cuban bankrolled his show on AXS TV--he believes in him. And now Skee and his company get more credibility and capital to keep creating, and incentivize brands to work with them.

"He's tapped into the forefront of pop culture," Cuban told us via email. "I respect that he's not afraid to speak his mind."

From Scott to Skee: How A Suburban Kid Became A Hip-Hop Mainstay

Not being afraid to speak his mind and pursue his ambitions got Skee noticed at a young age. At 16, he was already a wizard behind the boards, having mastered engineering and mixing classes at Central High School in St. Paul. Fast earning a rep in the studio, he parlayed a family friend's introduction into an apprenticeship with the legendary DJ Stretch Armstrong at New York's Hot 97 radio station. Skee would buy mixtapes on Canal Street in Manhattan, and then fly back and flip them in Minnesota. He would often double his money, and flood the suburban airwaves with previously unheard music. Skee would do the same with sneakers, PlayStations, Xboxes, anything he could get his hands on, and in a twist of fate, used that hustle to make the jump to the big leagues. During a meeting, Steve Rifkind, the founder of Loud Records, was venting to Armstrong about buying his son, Alex, a PlayStation 2. But he couldn't find anything on the shelves so close to Christmas. Spider-sense tingling, Armstrong reached out to Skee.

"Stretch is like, 'I might know this kid who might have one,'" Skee remembers.

Still wet behind the ears, the teen didn't even know who Rifkind was. But eager to please, he looked Rifkind up online, quickly realized his fortune, and overnighted a unit for free. Rifkind was so tickled with the fast turnaround, and with Skee's abilities in the studio, he decided to take the youngster under his wing. Skee then enrolled in online classes, graduated high school a year early, and followed Rifkind from New York to Los Angeles. The introductions and tutelage Rifkind provided paved the way for Skee's early progression.

"I looked at it almost like being drafted in to the pros," Skee remembers.

In 2002, Skee helped Rifkind run the marketing agency for his newly formed SRC Records. He soon branched out on his own, and because he had one foot in the music world, and one in marketing, he began linking artists with brands. The first was T-Mobile. At that time, Sidekick devices were all the rage, and Skee helped set that trend by brokering deals between the company and everyone from Juicy Couture to NBA star Dwyane Wade.

"It was the first real smartphone on the market," he says. "That's how I met so many artists too, because they were always going through me for seeding and getting product."

Blueprint To Success: Merging Music And Marketing

The success of that venture turned into a stint with Daimler-Chrysler, helping launch the Chrysler 300 magnums. Skee was fast building a name as the go-to guy for both artists and brands--and then things really hit light speed. While walking on L.A.'s Melrose Avenue, Skee bumped into the rapper Game. Rifkind had already introduced the two, and when they happened upon each other that day, something clicked, and hip-hop history would change forever.

"He played me the first lines of what would be 300 bars, where he was going to diss 50 Cent for the first time," Skee recalls with a smile. The Compton rapper wanted the nearly 15-minute song all on one beat. "I said, 'You should switch beats,' and sent him an MP3 sample, and he's like 'I love it.' I ended up producing 300 bars which really put me on the mainstream stage."

The rapper and DJ started working together, releasing hit mixtape after hit mixtape, and Skee began finding his groove, realizing he could straddle both artistry and sales.

"I knew at that moment the whole opportunity for me was open," he says. "There's not many opportunities you get to put your name out there, and this is one of them."

Game led to Skee connecting with Snoop Dogg. Then the ambitious DJ landed a show on L.A.'s Power 106 radio station, and then a slot on Sirius XM. Ever aware of the power of emerging technologies, Skee, along with Tomlinson and the rest of his team, were also shooting, producing, and releasing music videos for artists like DJ Quik and Soulja Boy, on YouTube--and racking up big viewership. The platform was in place.

"After I made it as a DJ, I realized the power I have," he says. That's when Skee and company rebooted their agency and dubbed it SKEEMATIC. "People say how do you walk between the streets and hip-hop and board rooms with the biggest executives in the world, and I think the answer is always stay true to who you are. It's all about being authentic. And people believe it. There's no way to hide it. I never pretended to be, or acted like I was hard. Same with the corporate world. I never pretended to be a Stanford student with an MBA."

Is Cashing In With Brands The Key To Cracking Digital Music's Future?

Back in the AXS studio, a basketball-tall rapper lumbers out of the green room and onto the stage. Wearing John Lennon Windsor sunglasses, a low bucket hat, and a red flannel shirt, the appearance of 2Chainz lets Skee breathe a sigh of relief. But he's so quick that he keeps poker-faced when the two embrace, and begins his rapid-fire interview with the flare of a natural-born performer.

Minutes later, when the director yells cut, and the cameras fade, Skee doesn't break character with his guest. Because he's not a character. That's really him out there. And that's why folks on both sides of the fence respond so positively.

"Value of a brand as an artist and a businessman parallel," 2Chainz says on the way to a smoke break. "It notifies fans you're both a true person, and a good follow."

Aaron Axelrod, a fine artist who has worked with Skee on multiple projects since 2007, says the elusive winning quality Skee possesses is his ability to keep genuine relationships with performers and the people who cut the checks.

"In L.A., everyone has huge egos," he says. "Skee keeps it humble, and because of that, you just want to do good stuff for him. He goes out of his way to make you feel appreciated, and when he thinks a brand fits for you, he brings it. It's rare to have all of these things--those qualities are really hard to come by."

Digital music is at a crossroads. Post-Napster, post-ringtone, post-iTunes. This is the YouTube and Spotify age where artists make more money off everything but the music they create. Instead of fearing this change, people like Skee are embracing it.

"I want to be the first person that really cracks this new digital age," he says after the show. "The music industry is trying to figure out what works, brands are trying to figure out what works, people are still trying to figure out how consumers are going to digest music and products."

Skee believes that music's ability to transcend language and culture makes it the most powerful marketing tool in the world--and the web is the medium to deliver it to the masses.

"Look at the reach of these artists," he explains. "Even though it might not be selling on a physical disc, or a 99-cent download anymore, because of the Internet, you're reaching so many people. It's just about flipping that power into everything else. Aligning brands with the right artists is the future. The real money is from touring, brands, sponsorships. If you want to reach kids, go through music, because that's what they're actually listening to."

The connected car race is heating up. On June 24, IBM and Toyota entered into a partnership to help build an app framework for new cars. Under a new agreement, Toyota will use an IBM-made application development platform for their T-Connect navigation and telematics service. Third parties will be able to build apps for Toyota cars using IBM's SDK, and IBM stands to make a substantial (and undisclosed) fee by having their app framework used in Toyota's cars.

Toyota's decision to make their cars "smart cars"--and to build functionality for apps and consumer-facing software into dashboards, touch screens, and radio consoles--is part of a larger trend by automakers to make car interfaces feel more like smartphones. Just this past week, Google announced a major push to bring Android into automobiles.

Custom-built navigation, car performance analysis, entertainment, and trip-planning apps do more than just provide customers with expensive car options they love. Custom nav also gives automakers like Toyota, along with the individual dealers that sell new cars, a secondary revenue stream thanks to the massive amounts of data points that telematics and in-car apps collect on users.

It's not just that apps like Pandora are preferred by customers; it's also that data about customers' listening habits can give companies like Toyota a pretty good idea in aggregate how many customers drive their cars to work and how many customers drop off their kids at day care. The more apps and the more extensive a telematics platform an automaker offers, the more information they and their dealers can collect.

Ford introduced their Sync app framework in 2010; GM launched an API and app store earlier in 2014. Many other automakers, such as BMW, also offer similar app frameworks. But all those automakers trail behind Tesla, whose Model S features an iPad-like tablet inside every car. Although in-car apps currently mainly turn up in new luxury models, it's safe to say they will be a fact of life for midrange and budget auto buyers within the next five years.

"What Toyota has purchased from us is a toolkit that allows developers to leverage, so as they build apps, so they are compatible with Toyota mobility platform," says IBM executive Karen Newman. "I think we're going to see more of this happen and it was great that they selected our tool for their platform."

"We're responding to bids at other OEMs that I obviously can't mention, but I think it's a hot area," adds Newman. "Some OEMs wonder about if they want an app store in the car, or if an app store offered by other providers would be better for their context. I think there are some advantages to having your own app store, both in making sure apps are compatible with your vehicle and in branding stickiness. However, this is still in an infancy stage and OEMs are still trying to figure out where to go from here."

A May 2014 report by consulting firm Capgemini said that connected cars are primarily popular among younger consumers and buyers in growth markets such as Brazil and Russia. According to a survey conducted by the company, the most requested uses for in-car apps were direct connections to roadside assistance, real-time information on road closures and repair work, easier access to vehicle information like the auto manual, and route optimizers that would show small changes to reduce gas use. Infotainment uses such as in-car Facebook, Twitter, or in-car purchases of music or media were not requested by most respondents.

Toyota's framework is based around IBM's Lotus Expeditor for Automotives, a popular "Internet of Things" platform. Lotus Expeditor is a development platform that was traditionally used for industrial and kiosk purposes, and has not been as prominent in recent years.

If you thought the Internet was finished disrupting the music industry, hang tight. With music consumption and distribution having been fully upended, the other side of the equation is ripe for change: Production. Accessible music creation software has been around for years, but a new wave of cloud-powered tools aims to revolutionize things even further.

LANDR is a new service that's likely to rattle some cages by providing recording mastering online and automatically. Traditionally, mastering is a skilled task performed by a recording engineer, but LANDR uses a sophisticated learning algorithm in order to eliminate the manual, human-powered work.

First, a song gets recorded, then mixed. Finally, it's mastered as the final step in the recording process. Mastering involves finely adjusting the audio for things most people won't be able to audibly detect without guidance. The mastering process also involves properly preparing the audio for a vinyl format versus a digital one.

"Our system does many different tasks, including the standard mastering processes like equalization, limiting, excitation, compression, tape emulation, and more," says Justin Evans, VP of products and innovations at MixGenius. "Which processors are used and how they are applied depends on the analysis of the incoming content."

LANDR is attempting to crunch big data in order to provide unique tweaks and improvements to songs automatically. The system isn't applying generic presets or any other blanket method to cover multiple songs. Instead, the service is using techniques similar to what Pandora and Shazam use to automatically analyze music.

"The algorithms were built by analyzing thousands of tracks, and by doing significant research and analysis of engineers' self-perceived behavior of what they are doing vs. the actual spectral and frequency changes that happened," Evans explains.

The mastering aspect is just the latest, but it isn't the only part of the recording studio being dramatically changed by the Internet. There are quite a few different services trying to alleviating the need for musicians to be in the same physical space for instance.

With Gobbler, different producers or engineers can easily sync tracks in different locations. Gobbler offers a Dropbox-like service targeted at musicians which can plug into their digital audio workstations (DAWs). It also offers an online backup done automatically to save the individual tracking recordings.

Splice is a similar service in that it automatically backs up an engineer's latest updates. The app's other big features is that it brings direct collaboration by showing a change log and allowing commenting. It's similar to the functionality of GitHub, but designed for the pro audio space.

Wavestack is yet another service providing the syncing of individual tracks across the web. It offers playback right on the site and the ability to mute or solo the different instruments as a way of playing around with different arraignments.

Besides software solutions, there's also hardware that's making it possible for musicians to feel like they're in the studio together even if they aren't. The most interesting hardware might just be Google Glass.

Sound engineer Young Guru joined the Google Glass explorer program late last year and began advocating that the headset had a definite place among recording artists. The thought was that since Glass allows for hands-free, first-person video chats, the same level of in-studio collaboration could be simulated among recording artists.

Glass has the potential to solve some of the issues around getting everyone together in a studio, even if it wasn't designed for that. Professionals like Guru, who has produced the majority of Jay Z's albums, are at the forefront of transforming what a recording studio looks like.

The recording studio will never fully disappear, just like physical media or live concerts won't ever go away. But make no mistake: The recording studio will never be the same.

Your smartphone is about as private as a public restroom. Prone to surveillance and data leaks, today's smartphones pay little more than lip service to the concepts of privacy and security. That's about to change.

The Blackphone, a new privacy-minded smartphone from encryption firm Silent Circle, went on sale this week. Unlike most phones on the market, the Blackphone promises to keep users' activity private and immune to the sort of security vulnerabilities commonly found in such devices.

"The problem we had to solve was simple: how do you provide a way for two or more people to communicate in a way that leaves no trail, no digital breadcrumbs, no centralized server that could be used to do an intercept on your communication?" says Blackphone CEO Toby Weir-Jones. "What we're trying to do is parlay the heightened awareness that exists around the surveillance revelations into an awareness that you have a choice, and that doesn't have to mean having your data harvested without your permission or knowledge."

Offering encrypted phone conversations, and a rejigged Android OS that is far from the "toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities" Apple's Tim Cook talked about at this year's WWDC, Silent Circle is hoping the Blackphone will change the face of mobile privacy forever.

So will it?

Our New Privacy Problem

Since Edward Snowden's revelations about government eavesdropping emerged in 2013, there have been thousands of column inches dedicated to the surveillance state and what it means for citizens.

But while companies like Google and Facebook have been outspoken about the need for sweeping changes in government surveillance, that hasn't stopped them from collecting huge amounts of data about their own users: data which is used to define your online identity--and can even be linked back to specific individuals, despite its promise of anonymity.

"For the past few years the trend we've seen has been for the main players in the industry to view the users as the product--the generators of marketable data which can be sliced and diced, correlated, and cross-referenced in a way that can be used to benefit advertisers and other related services," says Weir-Jones. "It's been a slow advance, much like the boiling frog analogy, where customers didn't realize what was happening until it was too late."

Weir-Jones points out that while this tracking is not necessarily "for evil purposes," it is definitely insidious. "What Blackphone gives you is the ability to assert your privacy rights on all forms of digital communications--whether that's voice, video, messaging, or just how you browse websites, or use network-enabled applications," he says. "The idea is that it should be your decision whether you choose to reveal your footprint to another party. If you choose to, no problem. But it should be your choice to opt in, rather than having the burden of figuring out how to opt out."

How Blackphone Preempts Snooping

Blackphone takes care of phone eavesdropping by eschewing regular GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) calls in favor of an encrypted data connection. To put this simply, consider how a regular mobile phone call is placed. Person A dials the number of person B, which the phone signal then connecting to a cell tower, based on the particular phone network being used, which then looks for the correct way to place the call to person B. Along the way there are multiple points at which the message can be intercepted.

With Blackphone, the calls are encrypted using cryptographic keys that exist only as long as the length of the phone call. There is no centralized set of rules for this code, and the data sent between the two (or more) phones doesn't go through a central switching network.

"Even if you were somehow able to intercept the package stream, you would also have to compromise both phones during the phone call in order to compromise the keys you would need to decrypt the message," Weir-Jones says.

The phone's operating system, known as PrivatOS, comes with a slew of useful packages for dealing with data mining, too. The texting tool, for instance, allows you to send files such as audio messages or GPS coordinates as well as regular text messages--and even lets you set self-destruct timers to each one, thereby adding another level of security.

The phone additionally comes with two years of 1GB-per-month Disconnect virtual private network service, alongside Disconnect's anonymizing search as part of the phone's web browser. Disconnect is a startup founded in 2011 by a consumer-and-privacy-rights attorney and, ironically, former Google engineers. It prevents search engines from tracking users' searches and locations.

Love Software? Build Hardware

Why do you need a phone to do this? Fair question. Founded by cryptography pioneer and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) creator Phil Zimmerman, Silent Circle started out by launching privacy-oriented iOS and Android apps in late 2012. The company's business model called for subscribers to pay $20 a month, in exchange for the kind of subscriber-to-subscriber conversations, encrypted video conferencing, encrypted text messaging, encrypted email, and storage, which come as standard with the Blackphone.

It was computer pioneer Alan Kay who once said that people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware as well. As it grew as a company, this idea appealed more and more to the Silent Circle team.

"We thought a useful thing for people who care about privacy [would be] to have a device that includes our services, as well as other software and services which increase privacy," says Silent Circle CTO and Blackphone board member, Jon Callas.

For Callas, it's all about the experience of the end user. "It's like giving someone a well-cooked and tasty meal as opposed to a cookbook and some ingredients," he says. "It's a better experience for them overall."

To build the Blackphone handset, Silent Circle paired up with GeeksPhone, a Spanish smartphone company most notable for building open Android phones, which also ran Firefox OS. "They weren't making hundreds of millions of units, but they had a very good understanding of how to do specialty products at a high level of quality, and bring them to a worldwide market," says Weir-Jones, who joined the company at this juncture.

One of the big advantages of building a handset from the ground up is that it let Silent Circle create a stripped-down version of Android's 4.4 KitKat release for its custom operating system. PrivatOS makes several changes to the core Android kernel to keep the phone better protected.

"We disabled a lot of the features we saw as leaky, and built an additional set of management tools to allow the user to very precisely control what permissions their applications have," Weir-Jones continues. "On most smartphones, your only options are to accept or reject the security requirements of individual apps. What we let you do is to install the app, after which your security center will identify all the security permissions needed, suggest security-conscious defaults, and allow you to fine-tune these permissions yourself. You can then change those any time you like."

One of the niftiest features of Blackphone is that it lets users communicate securely with other people, even when one side of the party doesn't own a Blackphone themselves. All they need is the Silent Circle app, which handles the call encryption. Fortunately, each Blackphone handset comes complete with three one-year "Friend and Family" Silent Circle subscriptions, which allow your contacts to install the service on their existing smartphones.

"One of the best features of Blackphone is that I can speak to you, even if you've got an Android or an iPhone," says Weir-Jones. "This is something I've not seen done before."

The Future Of Privacy

There are, of course, questions that will be raised. The most obvious and pertinent to Silent Circle is whether or not the Blackphone will sell. After all, while most readers may not like the idea of eavesdropping or mass data collection, many of us accept it as an inevitable part of life in 2014. No matter how admirable the aim of the Blackphone is, what percentage of smartphone users will shell out for one rather than picking up the new Samsung Galaxy S5 or forthcoming iPhone 6?

And while avoiding NSA eavesdropping is clearly important, are there potential criminal applications for the Blackphone, where it could become a next-generation "burner"--an update of the kind of one-use pay-as-you-go phone used by criminals in HBO's The Wire?

"The important point to make here is that we have no data to release," Weir-Jones says. "We will comply with requests, but even if you came along with a subpoena, there's simply nothing for us to reveal about our users because because we don't moderate or connect your calls."

A larger question concerns what will happen if tools like Blackphone do become successful. In the wake of major privacy stories in the press--ranging from Facebook data leaks to tales of NSA surveillance--this is not an entirely unrealistic proposition.

If this is the case, Weir-Jones thinks the Blackphone could help trigger major changes in the privacy space. "In the long run what we anticipate is that if people move away from seemingly 'free' tools like search engines because they perceive the costs to be too high, the market will be forced to step up," he says. "Instead of offering a tool based on monetizing your behavioral data, it may be that you could control your own data but instead pay these companies a small fee to use their services. In the past, everyone believed everything online should be free, and now we're seeing that maybe that's not going to be the case."

But while this is an idealistic view of future privacy, not everyone is so convinced it will happen anytime soon.

"I have often heard people suggest that the fact we will willingly use tools like Google which collect our data means we don't care about privacy," says Helen Nissenbaum, professor of Media, Culture and Communication and Computer Science at New York University, known for her work on privacy, trust, and security in the online world. "For me that is not correct. I hate the fact that airlines move the seats closer together to fit more on, and yet I still use the plane. Does that mean I don't care about my comfort? We can't draw a direct line between what we care about and what will put up with under duress. There are a lot of issues we need to look at here, but I think we're a long way from doing the kind of cost-benefit analysis that is useful for solving these problems."

Whether or not the Blackphone does become a major player in the smartphone market--or prompts further investigation into subjects like NSA eavesdropping and large-scale corporate data-mining--it seem that early units of Silent Circle's new handset have been very well received by their customers.

For Toby Weir-Jones and his team, that is enough. For now.

At SXSW, food trucks create prime opportunities for brands to influence the engineers, marketers, and executives who converge on Austin each March. Among the usual contenders at the 2014 SXSW was a strange food truck from an unlikely brand--IBM.

There, a food truck powered by Watson, IBM's cognitive computing platform, was serving up butternut squash barbecue sauce and Peruvian poutine--all ordered by voice, Siri-style.

It was a huge success. For IBM, cooking has become a "killer app" scenario for Watson. So earlier this week, Bon Appetit magazine and IBM jointly released the Chef Watson portal, which applies Watson's cognitive computing platform to the magazine's massive recipe database to provide home cooks with "infinite recipes." The invite-only portal lets users enter ingredients, the type of food they want to prepare (a sandwich? a stir-fry?), and a "style" to prepare food in such as Indian or Austrian, and then automatically generates 100 recipes based on those parameters. One of the big advantages for Watson's data scientists is that Bon Appetit presented them with a recipe database that was pre-formatted and quality tested, making IBM's job easier.

"We replatformed last year and switched to WordPress," Bon Appetit digital director Stacey Rivera told Co.Labs. "At that time, we did a huge data cleanup, which meant the recipes themselves were well tagged and well organized. As media companies do, we have been organizing our tags and metadata over the past year, so it was seamless."

But, of course, IBM isn't working on food apps just because Peruvian poutine sounds delicious. Watson was designed to provide users with answers based around natural language queries, and cooking turns out to be an ideal way to sell potential clients on Watson's gee-whiz factor.

Steve Abrams, director of IBM's Watson Life division, recently wrote that by the system could someday even generate new recipes. "One great thing about having Bon Appetit's repository is both the quality of recipes in the repository and that the tags show up in our user interface," Abrams told me. "Watson learns about cooking by scanning recipes and seeing new ingredient combinations and how they are put together. The fact that recipes were previously put together is very important, because that means they were tested and validated."

Because recipes are combinations of task lists and demonstrations of relationships between words and concepts--for instance, how cocoa and sugar show up in proximity and interchange far more than cocoa and avocado--they are a wonderful ground for attempting to understand instructional procedures and training software on a large corpus of work. One of the advantages of working with Bon Appetit, Abrams said, was that they offered IBM a higher-quality database of recipes than the public domain/Creative Commons recipes used to generate dishes for the SXSW food truck. According to Abrams, the public domain recipes they used had problems both in incorrect directions and outlandish flavor pairings or ingredients that skewed the final result. Bon Appetit's database, with recipes written in a standard format and using techniques verified in the controlled environment of a test kitchen, helped IBM solve that problem.

And IBM isn't the only company to see big value in the marriage of big data to food and recipes. Earlier this year, the Food Network and parent company Scripps Networks Interactive purchased a startup called Food On The Table, which combines users' eating habits with sales information from local grocery chains to deliver personalized shopping lists and meal plans. Because the food industry and the logistics industry which supports it have a wealth of data available for import, expect Watson and its competitors to do more with dining in the future.

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When the Colombian national soccer team tries to end Brazil's World Cup tournament run this afternoon, they'll have a high-tech advantage. The Colombian team will be armed with special insight into the physical load that can be endured by each player, thanks to specialized tracking hardware and the algorithms that power it.

Player "load" is often understood only through the physiological toll on an athlete's body during training. But Australian company Catapult has a different take. Using wearable GPS technology, Catapult maps athlete's body's across three planes, in three-dimensional space, to determine what is actually being asked of individual athlete's bodies.

"When Catapult invented this market category, no appropriate hardware platform existed," explains Igor van de Griendt, cofounder and engineer at Catapult. "This forced Catapult to develop the best possible hardware platform to use for elite sports."

Catapult uses only 10Hz GPS and the hardware, designed and manufactured in-house, is eight times more expensive to engineer than that of their closest competitor. With offices on three continents, Catapult manufactures the only monitors able to measure collisions and player load in space.

And while partner USMNT bowed out of the World Cup on Tuesday, Catapult's influence is global. The 2014 NBA Champion San Antonio Spurs, for instance, used Catapult systems to evaluate prospects leading into last week's NBA Draft. They even went so far as to send Catapult technology overseas to monitor international prospects on their radar. And the Colombian national soccer team--hoping to end host Brazil's tournament run tomorrow--employs Catapult's technology to help get them over the hump.

How Catapult Works

The F5 sensor is a compact tracking device that accesses both GPS and GLONASS to optimize positional accuracy. And while most modern cell phones come with similar technology pre-installed, Catapult's technology is more powerful. Each sensor has a 200-meg processor capable of broadcasting at 10 hertz, which means coaches and training staff have access to all the information instantaneously.

What sets Catapult technologies apart, however, are the intelligent algorithms in the devices' firmware. The hardware doesn't simply collect data for storage, it analyzes sport-specific movements and provides vital information to coaches and sports scientists.

The device houses a large GNSS antenna which accesses GPS and GLONASS. Inertial sensors--accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers--then capture every single movement an athlete makes and track them three-dimensionally so as to determine the strain exerted on each athlete's body.

"Some people think it's just a GPS device that shows a dot moving around on the screen, but it is the advanced inertial sensors, and the intelligent algorithms, inside the unit that allow you to analyze micro-movements like a goalkeeper's dive, a quarterback in the pocket, a jump shot etc." says Gary McCoy, senior applied sports scientist at Catapult.

And the best part is, individual athletes need no supplementary equipment. They can just strap up and play. "The device has an internal computer with memory so if you're just interested in capturing data, all you need is to wear the device and go out and play, then upload the data later," explains McCoy. "If you're interested in real-time information, you will need a laptop set up on the sidelines to see everything as it happens."

And range on the device up to 250-300 feet, so you can keep the computer where it belongs: on the sidelines.

The Story Behind The Tech

In 1976, Australia performed poorly at the Olympic games. At that time, the Australian government decided to invest heavily in athlete training and performance because, as Gary put it, "In Australia, our religion is sport." The government founded the Australian Institute of Sports where world class Australian athletes are housed and trained.

The original Catapult device, then, was used exclusively by the AIS for the next five years, seeing a definite spike in Australia's performance at the Olympics, as the technology was used across about 15 sports.

Catapult was officially founded in 2001 by Shaun Holthouse and Igor van de Griendt as part of an Australian scientific research organization called the Cooperative Research Centers (CRC). At the time, the only way to monitor athletes was in a lab or on a treadmill, and they obviously react differently in those environments compared to during competition.

Ten years ago Igor and Shaun founded Catapult Sports and took the product into Australian football--by their measures the most physiologically and biomechanically demanding sport on the planet. "Over the course of the last eight years, they've seen a staggering 33% soft tissue injury reduction in Australian football and close to a 40% performance improvement in the athletes," says McCoy. "It really has revolutionized the game."

In 2006, Catapult commercialized the technology for elite sports teams worldwide. Starting off with Australian professional teams, the technology was quickly adopted in Australian football before the focus was shifted to the European market, where the majority of the English Premier League teams became clients. And it's really just been in the last 18-24 months that Catapult has entered the U.S. market and has had great success, particularly in the NBA and NFL.

Looking Toward The Future

In the near future, van de Griendt hopes to steer Catapult away from hardware manufacturing and into analytics exclusively. Analytics, he explains, is where the real work is to be done.

"We see a future were the hardware component in this category will get commoditized, but the inflection point has not yet been reached, and thus we will continue to develop the best possible hardware platform available," reveals van de Griendt. "If an appropriate partner came along that can help with the development of the hardware piece, we would be interested."

In the meantime, however, Catapult is experimenting with supplementary biomedical technology it feels can improve everyone's understanding of player load.

"We are and do some biomedical measurements now. Simple heart rate, using an external strap. We want to move more into the Heart rate Variability. We're always trying to keep an eye on what is happing in the sensor industry," van de Griendt says.

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Glimpse is an ephemeral messaging app a la Snapchat that appears to take privacy just as seriously as other ephemeral apps take fun. The app uses end-to-end encryption when sending messages and keeps no user logs. It is much closer to the ideal of ephemerality than other apps that advertise the same. And despite its privacy chops, Glimpse appears to be taking off so far with millennials much more than crypto-nerds and security wonks.

"We want to bring privacy to the mainstream," Elissa Shevinsky, the cofounder of Glimpse, tells me during our chat in midtown Manhattan.

Shevinsky spoke to me at length about privacy and the importance of usability to mass adoption of privacy-oriented tools. From behind her black thick-rimmed glasses, she was just as comfortable talking about why privacy is important to democracy as she was explaining why online dating sucks for women.

"Glimpse has two missions," Shevinsky said. "The first is digital rights, which means we'll stand behind free speech and we believe that people have a right to communicate privately. We think that's very important to democracy."

"Our second mission is women in tech and in some ways that's less known." Shevinsky was recently profiled in a New York Times article on women in technology, which told the story of her split and eventual reconciliation with her business partner Pax Dickinson due to his tweeting in defense of an app called TitStare, which is about as awful as it sounds. When Dickinson apologized, Shevinsky came back to Glimpse--but this time as his boss.

"The women in tech mission was part of the deal that Pax and I made when I came back to Glimpse. Surprisingly Pax was very much in favor of that. He's been a real evangelist for me personally and has since surrounded himself with strong women."

Creating Real Ephemerality

Shevinsky's interest in privacy, her experience in online dating, and commitment to women in tech all coalesced naturally in Glimpse. As Founder and CEO of startup MakeOut Labs, her previous projects included a Jewish dating site and a hack for OkCupid that created a spam filter for users' inboxes. The latter was wildly popular with female users who are perpetually inundated with sleazy come-ons.

"I started realizing that the endgame for online dating was monetizing user data," says Shevinsky. "And I started to appreciate with Snowden's revelations that that was not a business I wanted to be in. I felt extremely good about being in the business of making dating better for women, but more than anything I wanted to work on anti-NSA activism last summer."

In addition to encrypting all messages sent on the network, Glimpse also refuses to keep logs on its users--a practice Shevinsky refers to as "life cycle ephemerality." After news that Snapchat doesn't actually delete messages once viewed and its unfortunate end-of-year hack, this kind of true ephemerality is increasingly valuable. Coupled with the online epidemic of revenge porn, women especially have reasons to prefer apps that are legitimately secure and delete data.

"The biggest reason we don't keep logs is to protect user privacy," says Shevinsky. "If the data isn't there, then we can't give it to third parties unintentionally against our will or upon request."

But according to Shevinsky, her motivation for not keeping logs is not solely to do the right thing. To her mind, it also makes business sense.

"An added side benefit of not keeping logs is that we save money on data storage expenses. It's expensive to store data for a long period of time and it's mostly unnecessary. Even though we can't monetize user data, I just don't see it as a financial compromise. There's so much money to be made in this space. I believe that we will have more market share and monetize our feature set better by being a company that people can trust for privacy. And we can deliver a better customer experience by not having advertising."

Shevinsky and Glimpse may be sailing just a little ahead of the trend with their decision. The European Union Court of Justice recently ruled that ordinary Internet users have a "right to be forgotten." The ruling has the biggest implications for search engines like Google, but Glimpse's log deletion might become a matter of complying with the law more than any altruistic or business motivations.

Shevinsky stresses that our contemporary obsession with "big data" was not how the Internet was originally conceived. Due to technical limitations, ephemerality was a given in the Internet's nascent stages.

"In the early days of the Internet persistence was rare. Anyone who was using the Internet in the '90s or early 2000s remembers using floppy disks because we didn't have Dropbox or Gmail," says Shevinsky. "So technologists started working on this problem of how to store data and we took for granted, of course, that we would actually want to. And then companies crept up with business models around the storage of that data."

Testing In The Greek System

According to Shevinsky, Glimpse's fastest adoption rate has come from sororities and fraternities on college campuses. Raine Dalton, creative strategy director for Glimpse, crafted a targeted outreach program specifically for Greek life organizations.

Dalton hires direct contacts at frats and sororities, trains them remotely, and then sets them out to recruit their fellow students to try out Glimpse.

"We're reaching out to undergraduate students who are involved on campus and members of sororities and fraternities," says Dalton. "These groups typically have strong communities and are more likely to be early adopters of a social, message-sharing app."

In that sense, targeting this subset of students is certainly one part just another smart business decision. But given the role of millennials as trend influencers, it is also a clever way to shoehorn encrypted messaging into the mainstream.

"They appreciate that Glimpse respects their privacy. And yet many new users ask us how the app is different from Snapchat and why they should use it. At first we were emphasizing privacy--that Glimpse offers users a more secure way to send content because of its encryption and screenshot protection."

It turns out, though, that privacy alone is not what draws this user base to Glimpse. In their user feedback and testing, it seems users appreciate the subtle consumer-facing feature-set that differentiates Glimpse from Snapchat: the fact that you can upload a photo from your camera roll, a more robust finger-painting tool, and the ability to layer a full screen of text over an image.

"We've since gotten feedback that people are using the app because of our advanced camera features," says Dalton. Shevinsky adds that "they like that Glimpse is encrypted but they aren't choosing it for that feature."

The stereotype of teens and millennials is that they are chronic over-sharers whose sense of privacy has been warped--if not eradicated--by the proliferation of social media. But Shevinsky sees the matter differently. She believes, like danah boyd, who has written on the topic for Fast Company, that millennials are actively creating a new sense of privacy.

"Young people are very savvy in creating new ways to connect in an ecosystem that often restricts their abilities to relate in more normal ways," says Shevinsky. "American teens and millennials are connecting more online because young people have fewer places and ways to connect with each other in the public sphere."

However, in Shevinsky's view, the act of connecting online does not mean that teens completely lack a filter.

"Teens and millennials seek privacy from their parents, their schools, future employers, and from the social drama that is a natural side effect of public sharing," she says. "So of course they will gravitate to new social networks. Unlike the rest of us who are looking to connect widely, teens and millennials have good reasons to find spaces to connect with their close friends and others in their peer group."

That last part explains the surging popularity of Snapchat and, consequently, could help boost Glimpse's appeal. Both apps satisfy the desire for social sharing, but facilitate it happening in a more selective and--dare I say--private way.

If young people do ultimately prefer Glimpse over Snapchat and other ephemeral messaging apps, whether because of encryption or camera roll features, the end result will be for messages that users intend to stay private do truly stay that way.

From Sexting To Democracy

It's no secret that sexting is one of the most common uses of Snapchat. And there is no reason to think that Glimpse would be anything different. That use-case might serve to partially explain Glimpse's popularity with the collegiate crowd.

"We wanted to build Snapchat for grown-ups. So sexting was part of it," says Shevinsky. "It was less that we wanted Glimpse to be a sexting app but more that Pax and I thought that it would be fun for us to just admit it."

The app's FAQ page has a humorous take on the sexting use-case, true to the founders' desire to be up front about how people actually use a picture messaging app in 2014. Today Shevinsky describes Glimpse as an "intimacy app" more than a sexting app. She sees it as a way for people to share passing moments with those they are close to--whether those moments are sexual or otherwise. (No doubt, though, that the ability to keep the NSA from seeing your naughty bits is a plus for users.)

Amid recent reports confirming that the NSA specifically targets privacy-conscious users, Glimpse could become an important piece of the technology landscape. Apparently, even searching for popular privacy software will trigger a user's IP address being logged. Because Glimpse feels more like a regular consumer app, it might not show up on the NSA's list of privacy tools that warrant closer monitoring of an individual. So having security measures like end-to-end encryption baked into consumer-facing apps such as Glimpse can mitigate some of the risk of opting for private communication.

In this way, the fact the Glimpse is a bit more whimsical and fun than what is normally thought of as a security app, actually ends up having security benefits.

"Sexting is actually supporting democracy," says Shevinsky, "because all the folks using Glimpse for very normal stuff end up being cover traffic for people using Glimpse for very serious political activism. And I'm happy about both of those use cases."

Shevinsky plans to wait until Glimpse is a little more robust before promoting it as an activist tool. But from here she is setting her sights high. With her rare combination of entrepreneurial sense and commitment to mission-driven growth, she is aiming to see Glimpse become a significant player in the social landscape.

"If we're going to actually live in an Internet where our data is secure, where necessary data is deleted, and where measures are taken for our privacy, then we'll need a company to be big enough to take market share from Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram. So it's not only about the design and usability, but also about our long-term goals. For both digital rights and women in tech, we really need to become a large, impactful company so we can make a change in the ecosystem."

It isn't every day that a constitutional law professor ends up advising a startup. But Eric Liftin, the CEO and cofounder of New York-based encryption firm Tunnel X (and an architect by training), has prominent legal scholar Laurence Tribe on his board of advisors. In a lucky twist of fate, Liftin was friends with Tribe's son and the legal scholar liked his elevator pitch: A secure platform for discreet conversations on smartphones and the web.

"I'm not a big fan of Snapchat-based communications," Liftin told Co.Labs. "They aren't made for real conversations, and are more one-off." He also has an unorthodox resume for the head of a security startup. Although he has roots in the Internet freedom space--he was an early fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, he's best known as an architect who heads up New York firm MESH and for web design projects which include popular foodie site Food52. Cofounder and CTO Steve Schneider, meanwhile, comes from an e-commerce background.

A launch event for Tunnel X in New York on July 8 has a guest list expressly designed to attract the sort of liberal intellectuals who normally don't mess around with encryption keys: Tribe, former New Yorker fiction editor Daniel Menaker, Lavabit attorney Ian Samuel, and Salon CEO Cindy Jeffers are all speaking at the event.

Tunnel X is one of a number of newish startups and products such as Wickr, Cryptocat, and Silent Circle which aim to provide users with both secure messaging and an easy-to-use interface. With continuing revelations of the NSA vacuuming up data from American citizens, corporate rivals routinely hacking into competitors' emails, and privacy concerns from a wide range of demographics and use cases, there has always been a market for secure communications platforms. Tunnel X is continuing as part of a larger trend of companies targeting this market with streamlined UIs that are easier for newcomers to use.

As far as user interface, Tunnel X shows promise. A pre-release Android build Co.Labs tested had problems setting up the service to run, but the web version showed no serious issues. Instead of using a conventional username and password, the service instead requires the user to enter a unique six-digit PIN code and upload a JPG photo to serve as an identifier. In order to enter into a conversation with another user, both parties are required to enter a unique passcode into the app. Liftin says a goal of the product is to replicate the "feel" of a private conversation that's set up to be discreet.

For encryption, Tunnel X is based around SSL connections secured by PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy), which prevents compromised keys from being used to view past communications. Archived messages in Tunnel X's systems are encrypted through three different algorithms, AES-256, TwoFish, and Serpent. Users also have the option to delete messages, and the company says a future version of the platform will give the option not to have messages archived.

According to the company, use of the service will initially be free and there are plans to convert to a subscription system later on.

Ca7ch founder and CEO Rom Eizenberg started thinking deeply about cameras after the birth of his son a little over two years ago.

"I discovered that new parents tend to be some of the most enthusiastic photographers," he says. "If not the parents, then the grandmothers who are pressuring from far away to take pictures."

It occurred to him that while people are still buying point-and-shoot cameras, they're nowadays more likely to actually be using their cellphone cameras to take and share quick snapshots, instead of taking photos with a traditional point-and-shoot, transferring them to a computer and uploading them to cloud storage or a social network.

So, when Ca7ch designed its Lightbox wearable camera, billed as "a camera fit for our times," it built it as a mobile phone accessory, not as a standalone unit.

"Lightbox works with your smartphone through built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, moving the camera's storage to the cloud and letting you instantly connect with friends and followers," the company explains on the webpage for its successful Kickstarter campaign.

That is, Eizenberg says, the 1.5-inch square camera, which can be attached with a two-part magnetic clip to a shirt, hat, or other piece of clothing, captures video and still images to its internal memory, then automatically syncs them via Bluetooth or a home wireless connection to a companion smartphone app and the company's cloud storage.

"The camera storage is the cloud," says Eizenberg. "As soon as it hits the phone, the app comes up and uploads the media to the cloud and clears the local phone memory." Once the images hit Ca7ch's servers, user settings allow the images to be posted to a social site like Facebook, where they can be made public or shared with a custom group of users.

The goal is to offer a simpler alternative to point-and-shoot cameras and even to older wearable cameras like those from GoPro. "GoPro is really really cool--we really love our GoPros," says Eizenberg, adding that they're harder to mount and wear than the Lightbox.

"Building the Lightbox, there were really two key words we had in mind that kept coming up: simple and fun," he says. And one advantage to raising funds on Kickstarter is that Ca7ch has been able to get feedback from fans even before the first Lightbox cameras are set to ship this fall. The company already boosted the amount of onboard memory in response to customer requests, and Kickstarter backers have even debated features they'd like to see in later models, he says.

"One user says I would love to see a wider view angle," he says. "Other users jumped in and said yeah, but we don't want the lens to become big." The company's also looking into making it easy to mount the camera on remote-controlled aircraft after getting inquiries, he says.

And as developers play with the Lightbox's API, they'll be able to build their own apps to help customers find new uses for the cameras, he says. "One of my friends is really into writing a baby monitor app," says Eizenberg, who's himself been able to see the world through his 2-year-old son's eyes by having the boy wear a Lightbox prototype. "The possibilities are really endless."

I've tried dozens of earbuds and earphones, but the problem is always the same: They never fit exactly right. I've been tempted on a number of occasions to get custom molded ones, but the hassle and time of going to an ear specialist for the molds has kept me from pulling the trigger. Obviously, I care a lot about listening to music, but I'm not about to go get a head orthotic.

Normal earphones could change all that. The company is allowing customers to take pictures of their ears via mobile app and have custom 3-D printed earphones assembled and delivered in as little as 48 hours.

Normal is claiming to be one of the first to mass produce a 3-D consumer product. To do this, the company uses Stratasys 3-D printers to print ABS earform parts, complete with soft touch coating, making each pair of earphones custom fit.

"At the Normal factory in New York City, we currently have 10 Fortus 250mc printers, two paint booths, two cleaning stations, two smoothing stations, and one laser cutter," says Normal founder and CEO Nikki Kaufman. "After the 3-D modeling and printing process, the earphones are assembled and tested on site. Our laser cutter is used to etch a carrying case with the customer's name as well as cut an acrylic insert to fit the unique shape of each pair of Normals. A customer's Normals will only fit in their carrying case and their ears."

Because the earphones are tied to the customization process, the only way to order right now, or maybe ever, is using the app. Available on iOS and Android, the app talks you through a guided process that involves holding a quarter on you face for scale while you rotate you head for 10 pictures. The same step is done for both ears because each ear is unique.

In the future you'll be able to visit the company's retail location in New York to have your ears scanned and the molds custom printed while you wait. The store opens in early August, the same time the Normal earphones begin shipping to people pre-ordering now.

Combining on-demand 3-D printed parts along with a mobile commerce system, the company is testing a new merchandising strategy. Services like Uber have succeeded by selling via mobile, but selling a product--only one product--through a dedicated mobile app is still new territory, as far I know.

The 3-D printing aspect is new ground as well. The UPS Store was the first retail location to start deploying 3-D printers which consumers could go and use, but mass production of a single 3-D-printed item is still relatively rare.

As far as the actual earphones are concerned, they're fairly standard, including a black or clear cable with mic and volume rocker. There isn't necessarily anything innovative about the audio portion of the product, unlike what some other companies are doing in the personal audio space.

Earin, for example, is testing the limits of small wireless earbuds connected by Bluetooth. The goal Earin has isn't for a custom fit, but two in independent earbuds that nearly disappear inside a listener's ear. There's also Dash which is doing something similar, but including activity, and heart rate tracking to its list of features.

Outdoor Technology founder Caro Krissman indicated to me in the past that if the earphones incumbents don't start to get innovative in their pricing and approach, they're going to get clobbered by the startups. If their risks pan out, Normal may be another piece of proof.

It's no surprise that the wearable tech craze is focused on hardware. After all it's the device we're referring to when we say something is "wearable." But soon these gadgets will become an afterthought. The real impact of computing's next phase will be to make software wearable.

Big players in the wearable space seem to know this. Nike announced a few months ago that it is getting out of the fitness hardware business. The company will refocus its energy on fitness apps, solidifying an imminent end to in-house updates of Nike's FuelBand wearable fitness tracker. Then at the end of June, Google announced its Google Fit developer platform for Android, also without a Google-branded device. And Apple has unveiled iOS8's HealthKit, with no Apple-branded activity tracker or "iWatch" anywhere to be seen.

"The physical device and any sensors that may be embedded are frankly along for the ride," says Jason Krikorian, general partner at the investment firm DCM. While it's good to put effort into the design of a wearable fitness tracker, the device just becomes the means to collecting data. The real power in the UX will be what the software does with the data.

Wearable Tech Meets Apps

Of course, there's an ecosystem under development here. Wearable gadgets that help people lead healthier lives and get more out of their workouts eventually sync up with software of some sort. Pedometers, the most common wearable fitness devices, go hand in hand with apps. The Jawbone UP relies on its app to provide a complete product to its user. And the Fitbit has become the center of a genuine third-party fitness app boom. Devices and apps from Mio look promising too.

"It's about taking physiological data but turning it into answers that you can take action upon," says Jake Waxenberg, who does marketing and business development at Athos, which has a product in the works that tracks electrical muscle activity. Using special form-fitting garments (think Under Armour), sensors embedded in the fabric send data about muscle activity back to your phone.

The company stresses the importance of its users interacting with the dedicated app. "We wanted to create something that was actionable," says Athos CEO Dhananja Jayalath. He says that although understanding how fast your body can modulate your heart rate can indicate how in shape you are, getting an idea of how your muscles work can give you goals to work on from set to set. It's what Jayalath and Waxenberg like to call "actionable insight."

Users are meant to consult Athos's mobile app between workout sets to understand how much they have worked each muscle according to a color-coded map of the body. An "Athos Score" sums up how much physical effort the user has spent during a workout, interpreting muscle effort, breathing rate, and time spent actively moving. So, the user does not see muscle activity data points over time. She sees Athos's interpretation of its device's output. From there, she can tweak her next workout set.

"The reality is that hardware has very little value, over time, to a consumer," says David DeWolf, CEO of 3Pillar, a software solutions firm that helps wearable hardware companies develop companion apps for its products. "It's fun, it's sexy; they're things that early adopters want to play with. But, over time, the value comes from the insight, the analytics that gives us software that runs on these devices or integrates with these devices."

Unclear Data Collection

Software's growing hold on the wearables industry might not have come at a better time. As wearable sensors creep into more types of designs, their data-sensing capabilities become more abstruse. But the user does not need to analyze the raw data or assess its validity, since the software app distances her from it. She is principally interested in the app's insight.

Increasingly more companies are trying to fit data sensors into the objects that you use every day. In the fitness world, wrist wearables are becoming the standard, as popular activity trackers show. And clothing is becoming an area of development, in the case of Athos, among others.

There is, however, an issue with putting biometric sensors into commonplace objects. To take most types of physiological data, placing the appropriate sensors on the right spot on a subject's body requires extensive preparation and specific techniques.

The most reliable way to measure heart rate is to fix a sensor around your torso with a chest strap, but wearables companies peddle a wrist-worn design. It is more practical for the average gym patron to wear a discreet gadget than donning an uncomfortable chest strap under his or her clothing. Historically, however, wrist-worn heart rate monitors have had problems measuring heart rate when a user began to move faster and faster, which typically happens during a workout.

The Basis Watch--which is still on the market despite technical issues--is one of the wrist-worn heart rate monitors that has been shown to choke during periods of user movement. The watch now comes with a disclaimer saying that it most likely will not work when the user moves. "But it never worked," says Liz Dickinson, CEO of Mio. "The minute you started to move, the heart rate data completely stopped getting a realistic or practical number."

Recent technology has made it possible to better measure heart rate without the chest strap, enabling wrist heart rate monitors, like Mio's, to thrive. Mio now uses an algorithm from Philips to filter out ambient noise, like body movement and activity from tendons, to obtain clear biometric signals. Dickinson assures us that Mio's products provide the most reliable continuous heart rate monitoring technology in wrist wearables on the market.

Like heart rate monitoring, traditionally measuring muscle activity requires a distinct data collection method. Athos built its wearable myoelectric sensing technology on the principles of electromyography, or EMG. Measuring EMG signals from the muscles typically requires placing adhesive onto or invasive electrodes into the widest part of the muscle, called the belly. Athos's design uses neither type of sensing method.

"Since we don't use medical electrodes, we don't use a lot of the other medical electrodes' big systems' techniques for shielding the noise," says Athos's Jayalath. And building sensors into clothing introduced even more noise that is typically not there during traditional EMG recordings.

So Athos has spent much of its research and development time until now figuring out how to obtain intelligible muscle signals with its setup, minus the noise. Now, Athos uses an in-house model to extrapolate muscle activity in each muscle group after normalizing each data signal to a baseline that is unique to each user. "A lot of the work that we've put in has been going into algorithms that are smart, hardware that is very new, and using a very different approach that standard electromyography has been to capture the signal accurately," says Jayalath.

Athos plans to roll out its myoelectric gymwear this fall but had originally announced shipments for spring 2014. Jayalath attributes the delivery delay to manufacturing complications.

Even if the biometric signals from wearable devices don't completely align with medical measurement standards, consumers will place more value on the insight that a company can give on the data. "It's not about what's more accurate, it's about what's the most actionable. How can I use it to improve my day-to-day life?" says 3Pillar's DeWolf. "But accurate to the nth degree at the end of the day for a consumer doesn't really matter."

It's About Changing Behavior

What matters most to wearable tech users is what the data can teach them to improve their lives. An app's "actionable insights" do just that.

"The real goal is behavior change. And to effect that, the experience must deliver insights that are actionable and motivational," says DCM's Krikorian.

Just before founding Mio, Liz Dickinson had another child, bringing the total to three. With her mounting responsibilities pulling away at her free time, she realized how scarce her time at the gym was and set out to optimize it. She ended up founding an entire company to develop a wrist-wearable fitness tracker that could motivate her to get the most out of her workouts before falling back into work and home responsibilities. "When you only have an hour or 45 minutes, you want to be darn sure that it's the best that it can possibly be," says Dickinson.

Email is going places. It's old tech and might as well be a carrier pigeon in the eyes of youth, but email is continually getting new legs. Apps like Mailbox keep amassing catchy, useful new features, and now we're seeing a glimpse of email's next incarnation: as a platform.

For evidence, look no further than Gmail's newly announced API. Announced at Google I/O a few weeks ago, the API will give developers programatic access to messages, labels, and other aspects of the Gmail service. In a similar fashion, newly announced startup Inbox promises to be the lay between app developers and people's mailbox.

"When we think about email, we call it 'the database of your life,'" says Michael Grinich, co founder and CEO of Inbox. "It's the digital home for your conversations, memories, and identity."

After about two years of work, Inbox is just beginning to take the wraps off what it's been working on. The service will provide access to different parts of the mailbox so developers can leverage the information relevant to users. It hasn't publicly announced the details of its developer program, but it will be a hosted service that will also support Microsoft Exchange. The company is rolling things out gradually, but interested developers can ask for early access now.

The app scenario being widely cited is a hypothetical travel app able to scan emails for upcoming trip details. Instead of the current process of having to forward emails to sites like TripIt.

Context.IO is another service that provides a layer on top of IMAP making it easier for app developers to leverage email data. It also sees this type of database for apps as part of email's future.

One thing Inbox's Grinich and Context.IO developer evangelist Tony Blank both agree on is that IMAP isn't really going anywhere. Even though people got excited about a newer protocol for Gmail with Google's API announcement, the creaky standard isn't in trouble.

"There's a few efforts to try and replace the underlying protocol, but it's very tough for that to happen," Blank says. "There might be alternative protocols that emerge--IPv4 vs. IPv6--but IMAP will continue to exist and be supported for many years."

The reason IMAP is constantly being marched out to the guillotine is that it wasn't designed to do these new type of database functions. That means if email is going to turn into the content for apps to use, third-party layers will be necessary.

Even if Gmail's new API doesn't take over the industry, the service has still had a tremendous impact on email. Despite Gmail's increased storage able to be brushed off as declining costs, it might have been the linchpin in changing email's direction.

"I've been using Gmail for many years and they've removed the tedious requirement to purge and delete old emails," says Blank. "That fact has created a huge source of email data that dates back many years."

If people didn't start letting their email pile up in their mailbox, there likely wouldn't be enough personal information to be relevant. The bottomless pit that is now email might drive some people crazy, but it's unlocking new possibilities for apps.

If the past is any indicator, email will likely be the basis of some new fad in the future, but right now, it's headed toward being a personal app database.

All those white earbuds apparently aren't telling the whole story of how much people appreciate high-quality audio content. Just a few months ago Neil Young's high-resolution audio device Pono raised a shocking $6 million to build a--wait for it--triangle-shaped portable player that claimed to sound better than normal music players. Now, a second audio company is raising a hefty amount of money to do the same.

Geek Wave is a new portable audio player that, among other things, confirms the ability to listen to quality audio on the go is something people want. As the project hits its final hours, it has safely cleared a million dollars in crowdfunding with an initial goal of $38,000.

The Geek Wave chose a less controversial--rectangle--design than Pono did, something that should fit in a pocket easier. The more interesting aspects, however, are inside the device. It's able to play standard MP3s, but also claims to be the world's only 32-bit/384 kHz PCM capable and native DSD player. Meaning it can literally play the best audio content available anywhere.

The Geek Wave device supports all lossless and lossy formats and is powered by 10 processing cores: a dual-core MIPS32 MPU from Microchip Technology and an eight-core 500MIPS CPU from XMOS. There's a 3,100 mAh user-replaceable battery to support the power being consumed by playback.

If the portable Geek Wave is starting to sound like an audiophile's dream rather than an iPod replacement, you'd be right. Nothing about the device is really targeted at the average consumer. Everything from its $399 retail price tag for the 64 GB version to its complicated ease of use.

iTunes can't really handle the higher-end audio formats well, if at all, and so Geek Wave buyers will get (for an additional $20) GeekPerfect software. The Mac software is a partnership with BitPerfect, which will work in concert with iTunes and allow it to be the main playback software. It will accommodate DSD playback as well as "squeezing the best possible audio quality from your Macintosh computer."

Unlike Pono, Geek Wave isn't getting into the content business. Pono is trying to appeal the mainstream by giving users a store to buy high-quality music, but Geek Wave buyers will need to continue to acquire music from their previous locations.

Interestingly the high-end audio device will also be able to support Wi-Fi streaming. The Zero Transmission Jitter Wi-Fi add-on will stream music over home networks while keeping an eye on not compromising the signal quality over the air.

There's a more complicated answer, but, in short, the solution for Wi-Fi streaming is for the files to get buffered using local flash memory. This should make them as good as locally stored music on the Geek Wave. Wi-Fi streaming will support most 2.4GHz frequencies including B, G, and N.

A lot of people are still waiting to see how these high-quality audio devices like Pono and Geek Wave do outside of crowdfunding and in the hands of real people. Will they be relegated to the niche audiophile community or pick up a real audience?